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" THINK BACK. Once upon a time, your car was a guarantor of freedom. Unfortunately, the intervening years and their grown-up responsibilities have taken that heady wanderlust and suplexed it into the ground. But now you&amp;#039;ve saved up and you figure if you can part with, say, $500 a month, you can drive away with something good. Something that may help recapture that lost feeling of possibility you had when you were young. Of course, now you need a car for you more than ever: You&amp;#039;ve got far more shit to get away from. Fortunately, you picked the right time. Lots of good cars are out there--fun, safe, reliable cars that&amp;#039;ll go 100,000 miles before you ever have to open the hood. Unless you like opening the hood, in which case maybe the better option is to go for something un-brand-new. Something that&amp;#039;ll break every once in a while, that&amp;#039;ll have you cursing the day you bought it, then come back with a glorious four-wheel drift on a random Sunday afternoon that brings a smile to your face when you think about it. Below are some thrill-inducing examples from today&amp;#039;s carmakers, along with their temperamental, inconsistent, and positively marvelous spiritual predecessors. --PHIL PATTON Audi TT/Porsche 356: Audi has long wanted the world to consider it a design leader, but it wasn&amp;#039;t until the radically Bauhaus-influenced TT hit the streets that anyone took the marque seriously. Very seriously. And to whom does it owe its upturned-bathtub/horseshoe-crab looks? Go back about 50 years to when Porsche raided the VW parts bin and cooked up the 356, as Teutonically pure a sports car as there ever was. No flash, no pizzazz, just the coolly confident in-line four-cylinder whining over your right shoulder as you drop it into third on a sweeping left turn, and suddenly it&amp;#039;s not a Sunday drive to the beach anymore--it&amp;#039;s the final lap of Le Mans and a checkered flag awaits.  Mazda Miata/Austin-Healy &amp;quot;Bugeye&amp;quot; Sprite: Mazda hit a home run when it combined really boring Japanese reliability with something quite magical: the kind of simple, open-top motoring that can be provided only by an old British roadster. Most British cars, like the Bugeye, are right there beside you--they can&amp;#039;t outperform you, and you can&amp;#039;t outdrive them. Oh, they&amp;#039;ll leak, the Lucas electrical system will live up to its Prince of Darkness reputation, and models with drum brakes will positively scare the bejesus out of you, but when it&amp;#039;s sunny and the top&amp;#039;s down and you&amp;#039;re having more fun chucking that roller skate of a car into a turn at 40 miles an hour on a leaf-strewn back road in Massachusetts than you ever could in some modern miracle of manufacturing at three times that speed, that&amp;#039;s magic.  Honda S2000/Datsun 240Z: &amp;quot;Performance car&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Japanese&amp;quot; are terms most often combined with a giggle, but Honda shut us up right quick with the new S2000, a car that handles like a Tyco RC racer, with an engine that redlines at such a pitch that it&amp;#039;ll shatter your Oliver Peoples. Of course, the boys at Honda may feel like tipping their hats to their competitors at Nissan. Back in 1970, when it was still Datsun, Nissan gave us the 240Z and instantly got vaulted to the rank of King of the Parking Lot. Vettes were too ridiculous, Camaros too obvious, but the Z had a way of sneaking up on you. Rolling up in your Z at Franklin D. Roosevelt High School (or wherever you may have served time), girlfriend with the Tommy T-shirt in the passenger seat, &amp;quot;Child in Time&amp;quot; blaring out over the aftermarket speakers--admit it, you were never cooler than you were at that particular moment.  Hummer/International Harvester Scout: If only machine-gun mounts were on the option list. Even without them, fewer things get you more noticed than a Hummer--hell, the sucker&amp;#039;s six feet wide. Of course, if what appeals to you is its go-anywhere ability, you could also get yourself an International Harvester Scout for a fraction of the price (and none of the negative Arnold Schwarzenegger associations). Have a ranch in Montana? Want to feel like you do? Strap a jerrican to the fender, jack up the suspension a couple of inches (not to monster-truck height, hoss), throw down the windshield, take off the roof, and bounce and clamor your way over this great land, reveling in the joy that can come only when every modern safety and environmental regulation is being laid waste right before your very eyes.  2000 Porsche 911/1974 Porsche 911: Without question one of the most enduring designs in the history of the automobile. So much so, in fact, that its only real competition is its former self. Today&amp;#039;s 911 Carrera is perhaps the most powerful car extant that can be driven every day. It has a fearsome combination of power, stabil-ity, and comfort. That&amp;#039;s why we like the models from the mid-&amp;#039;70s, say 1974, before they worked out all the kinks. You could take it down to the local track and drive it in such a fashion that you marvel that you&amp;#039;re still alive today. Skittish, tail-happy, and unforgiving, the earlier Carreras (which then were air-cooled and therefore had the best throttle note this side of a Ferrari V-12) could pound the ever-living shit out of you yet keep you coming back like a kid who doesn&amp;#039;t know any better. You want a brown one. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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